


Trust Fall

by 221BFakerStreet



Category: Burn Notice
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Fluff and Angst, Gay, M/M, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-27
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-08-17 14:03:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8146835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221BFakerStreet/pseuds/221BFakerStreet
Summary: By the time the boat is docked in a small disused jetty, the salt wind has dried his face. Guilt blooms cold in his chest, and he holds it like a precious thing. He sets it carefully behind him on a shelf, a lifetime ago, in the house where he grew up. Lets it stand like a little stone Buddha over all the things he’s lost along the way.---This is essentially a season 7 fix-it/what-if, where there is no Sonya or James, there is no deal with the CIA, and the only option left is to run.





	1. The Mythology of Love

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, so here's a thing.
> 
> Like, I know I should be working on Part 3 of White Elephant, but quite frankly it's giving me hell so IT CAN WAIT DANG IT.
> 
> I wrote this a while back, after Netflix bingeing this wonderful series. I didn't rewatch the last 2 seasons though because they made me hella sad. And then I was like eff it, that's what fanfic is for amirite? 
> 
> PLEASE NOTE: Part Two takes place chronologically BEFORE Part One. I know that's weird, but that's just how it is.

 

Jesse shakes the snow from his jacket, stomps his boots on the welcome mat, and steps inside. The yellow light glows starkly from above as he carefully swings two bags of groceries onto the kitchen table.

“Fi?” he calls, pulling his hood down. “Mike? I’m home!”

Instead of Fiona or Michael, a blonde-haired blur races around the corner and pitches straight into his legs. He grins, and scoops Charlie up into his arms. “Hey, kiddo! Where’s uncle Mike?”

The boy laughs and plays with Jesse’s brown scarf- a thing Fiona knitted for him when she got stir crazy last winter; not pretty, but warm. Jesse sighs, and steps further into the house. Just as he’s about to cross the threshold into the hallway, Michael appears like a ghost from the darkness, an exasperated look on his face. “Charlie,” he says, in his ‘coddling the asset’ voice, “what did I say?”

Charlie simply giggles again, and tucks his face into the horrendous scarf, and Jesse grins at Mike, raising an eyebrow. “Bath time?” he guesses, and Michael offers his own pained smile.

“Come on, kiddo,” Jesse says, setting the frowning five year old down on the carpeted floor. “If you take your bath tonight, I’ll definitely play Nintendo with you tomorrow.”

Charlie’s head snaps up so fast Jesse’s surprised he doesn’t get whiplash. “Street Fighter?”

Jesse’s grin widens. “Yeah, man, Street Fighter.” Charlie races to the bathroom, and Michael mouths a silent ‘thank you’ before following the little human tornado into the bathroom.

“Oh! Hey, where’s Fiona?” He shouts after them, and Mike pops back around the corner only to tell him that she’s been called up to the mine to lend them a hand with some rock blasting. Sam took Madeline to some expo in the city, to give them both a break from country living- maybe also to give Michael and Madeline a break from each other, because some things really don’t change. Jesse sighs, alone in the dimly lit hallway; looks like he’s bringing in the rest of the groceries himself.

* * *

 

By the time everything is put away, Charlie is in bed and the snow has piled up at least two more inches outside. Jesse hands Mike a beer as he enters the room, and he takes it. He sits at the table and sets the bottle in front of himself, doesn’t open it. The hiss of Jesse’s beer opening draws Michael’s gaze to his hands. He sits across from the older man and takes a swig of his beer. There was a time when they didn’t talk about this thing, whatever this thing between them is. And even though it’s no longer forbidden territory, they still haven’t quite figured it out.

So Jesse is understandably nervous, he thinks, when he clears his throat and asks, “So… what are we doin’, here, Mike?” Michael’s head snaps up, and Jesse almost flinches. The phrase ‘bull in a china shop’ comes briefly to mind, and he sucks down another mouthful of beer before he can say anything else.

“I, uh… I’m not really…” Jesse thinks that maybe he should feel the sting of rejection, instead of the relief that floods through him. But it makes sense when he settles back in his seat, looks at it closer. This isn’t rejection, and Michael Westen is blushing. “I think we’re… dating?”

There is a small moment of silence, and then they are both laughing. Mike finally pops the top on his beer, and swallows in between fits of unmanly giggles. “Jesus,” he says, scratching absently at the neatly trimmed beard that has managed to stick around through all of Fi’s and Madeline’s objections, “I feel like a god damn teenager again.”

Jesse can’t exactly pinpoint whether that’s good or bad right now, so he just laughs and says, “I know the feeling.”

For a while afterward, they talk about other things, every day things. How Charlie’s recent growth spurt is driving Madeline a little crazier than usual. Jesse complains about their car shop’s current lack of an office gremlin, and Mike practically double dog dares him to ‘ask Fiona to play secretary’. Jesse declines by tossing the twist cap from the beer at the older man, and intoning that he would like to keep his cojones exactly where they are, thank you.

Outside in the darkness, tree branches creak under the weight of the snow. The kitchen light casts a white-yellow glow across Michael’s features as his smile settles into a gentle hum of contentment. Jesse’s mouth goes a bit dry, his heart goes a bit fluttery. He stands, without entirely knowing his own intention at first. Those blue eyes look up at him, gentle but questioning.

“Let’s go to bed,” he says, and offers his hand. Michael takes it, and Jesse smiles.


	2. Devil in the Wishing Well

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> AAAAANNNNGST. But also some good stuff.

 

* * *

 

Stripped bare of all the things that had given him purpose, Michael begins to see, in stark relief, the path which has led him to this moment.

Dead Larry’s face looms before him in the mirror, and then his father’s, and then his own. He almost doesn’t recognize himself, gaze wide and terrified in the glass. For the longest time, Sam and Fiona, his mother and Jesse, they had been the blood in his veins. They had given him movement, and then-

And now, he is stumbling, tripping over his own feet. His brother. His little brother, who loved him, and annoyed him, and gave him hell, and had his back; his little brother is dead. And it’s all Michael’s fault.

Piece by piece, the puzzle had filled. And some parts were missing, gaps minuscule at first, but growing larger all the time until they had eclipsed even the burning heart of the sun in their scope. Until those spaces enveloped him in their emptiness, swallowed him whole. The Michael in the mirror can’t look his own reflection in the eye. The Michael in the mirror had gone down the rabbit hole, and he has found himself, all alone, at the bottom.

* * *

 

Fiona doesn’t talk to him for the entire first week of the boat ride. Michael doesn’t really talk to _anyone_. His mother speaks quietly to him when she isn’t watching Charlie. Sometimes he leans his head on her shoulder, but mostly he just watches the sea water churning at the back of the boat as they make their way up the east coast.

They are four days in when Jesse thrusts a cereal bar into his hands and simply says: “Eat.”

To his own surprise, he unwraps the bar and begins chewing mechanically. Jesse sits beside him the whole time, worrying the hem of his shirt in between his thumb and forefinger. For a very long while, it seems, they stare out at the ocean together. The sky behind them is gray and shaded, nothing like the Miami skyline.

“Storm’s coming in.” Jesse intones almost delicately, and Michael crumples the foil wrapper in his hands just to have something to do. “We’ll be docking near Virginia Beach ‘til it passes.”

Michael can feel the heat of Jesse’s arm through the fabric of his shirt sleeve; can hear the bubble and lick of the water and the thrum of the engine. He squints up at the sky.

“I used to get in front of him,” he says, his eyes seeing something just beyond the dim horizon, but almost close enough to touch. “Nate, I mean. When dad got angry. Sometimes.” He feels like the world is on the tip of his tongue. He remembers a time when the words wouldn’t come out. He remembers the sharp sting of his mother’s stillness, Nate’s flinching face. “I was supposed to protect him. I always ended up leaving him behind.”

Jesse doesn’t say anything that Michael actually hears after that. All he will remember is the stalwart and comforting presence beside him, sitting and waiting together for his tears to subside, the steady pressure of a warm hand gripping his own.

By the time the boat is docked in a small disused jetty, the salt wind has dried his face. Guilt blooms cold in his chest, and he holds it like a precious thing. He sets it carefully behind him on a shelf, a lifetime ago, in the house where he grew up. Lets it stand like a little stone Buddha over all the things he’s lost along the way.

* * *

 

By the time they make it to New Brunswick, Michael has begun what promises to one day be an impressive beard. He and Fiona are on speaking terms again, tentative and strange, but it’s something at least. It’s a place to start. Things with Sam have never been uneasy for long, and it’s almost strange how easy it actually is to fall back into their old rhythm.

He skirts around Charlie like he doesn’t know quite how to handle the kid’s very existence. When the little blonde-haired boy reaches out his hand to him, he takes it. They walk together in silence for a while. Michael wonders where Charlie got that from, because it certainly wasn’t either of his parents. And he thinks he could be okay like this, that they could _all_ be okay.

He knows his mother is watching from the dock. Charlie hands him a smooth gray rock, and Michael smiles and thinks that maybe… any day now he’ll feel good again.

* * *

 

Every morning he wakes from a new nightmare.

Fiona looks at him askance sometimes, the way she used to when he had been hunting the people who burned him. Sometimes Michael looks into her eyes and they reflect his ghosts back at him. They both care too much, and it’s a real problem for them; always has been. Tangled up in each other until he can’t quite tell where he begins and she ends. He’s never wanted to lose himself that way, but they used to feel like _more_ , somehow, when they were together.

In this nightmare, Fi was drowning.

He scrubs his hands over his face, as though wiping away the remembrance of it. Thin, pale tendrils of early dawn light skitter across his bedroom floor as the tree outside his window sways gently in the wind. He thinks he can taste the salt of the sea on his lips, and his hands are wet with it. But he didn’t have any hands in his dream. He looks down at the twisted bed sheets, blinks hard a few times.

The bathroom is unoccupied this early in the morning, and he uses the faucet by the glow of the night light that’s plugged into the wall. He washes his face, uses the toilet, and spends a few minutes just staring into space.

When he enters the kitchen he’s surprised to see Jesse already sitting at the small round table, cleaning his Sig Sauer 1911 in the dim glow of a lamp, the light of which is slowly being drowned out by the sunlight beaming through the curtains. He barely looks up as Michael enters.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asks, heading for the coffee pot. His voice is rough with sleep and tears, and he clears it a few times before he hears Jesse’s answer.

“You know how it is.” The smell of gun oil and the smooth click of the pieces fitting together soothe Michael in a way almost nothing else can. Like a plan coming together. And he appreciates the words maybe more than he can say.

“Yeah… Coffee?” he asks, and yawns. Reaches for two mugs in the cabinet.

“Yes, _please_.” Jesse sets the newly cleaned and reassembled gun in the lockbox on the floor by his chair, and opens the fridge to get the half and half. The smell of brewing coffee slowly fills the room. They stand next to each other, the sides of their hands brushing together. Michael feels that jittering thing within him begin to crawl back into its hole as the seconds pass.

The stillness of everything is almost insurmountable. He pours the coffee and hands Jesse a mug, watches the steam rise from the black brew until his attention is drawn back to the man at his side. Jesse’s eyes cut quickly back to his own cup of coffee. Jesse does not ask him the questions he cannot answer yet.

And Michael almost smiles.

* * *

 

There is a violent thing that lives inside of him.

Michael is leaning against the wood paneling exterior of the only bar in town, spitting blood into the snow. The wind whips hard from the black forest surrounding the building as he pokes none too gently at the bruise forming under his left eye. The sound of a truck pulling into the parking lot overtakes the music and laughter from inside, pressing his heartbeat into the back of his throat so he almost can’t swallow.

He must look worse than he feels, because the look on Sam’s face is one part anger, two parts pity. Snow crunches beneath his best friend’s boots as he approaches.

“Aw, Mikey…” Sam looks down for a moment, at the blood, and then back up. “You can’t keep doin’ this to yourself.”

And he knows that. Holy shit, does he ever know that. But the things he _doesn’t_ know… they could fill an entire ocean, he bets. For a minute he simply leans forward with his hands braced against his upper thighs and tries not to vomit. Like his legs might run off without him, cause more trouble while the rest of him just floats in a nauseous limbo of his own design. Like a train jumping the track.

He doesn’t know how to stop a runaway train, either, so he’s more than a little bit lost here. “Sam…” He has no idea what he’s planning on saying after that, but it doesn’t matter, ‘cause Sam just leads him to the truck and tucks him away into the passenger seat. They sit together in the car, with the wind churning the trees and the muffled sounds from the bar bleeding out at the edges.

“Jesus, Mike; I think sometimes you don’t know what to do if everything isn’t fucked up.”

Michael wants to laugh at that. ‘Things _are_ fucked up,’ he wants to say, ‘ _I’m_ fucked up.’ But he doesn’t, because maybe that isn’t quite what he means. Problems have solutions, and he’s always been able to find them; even if they aren’t perfect, even when the risk seems to loom larger than the reward can ever hope to be. He’s spent so long in that endless parade of _fix_ , _solve_ , _just-live-through-this-moment_ , that the idea of rebuilding a life seems alien to him.

“You’re right,” he says, instead. He folds his arms on top of the dash, lays his aching head on them. “I just…” The words catch in his throat. He’s used to not knowing things, but he’s very much unacquainted with cowering in the face of his own existential crisis.

“Mike, I-“ The moment when Sam starts to speak is, of course, the moment the words choose to come out.

“I don’t know what to do, here, Sam.” Once the words are out, they are easy- relative to whatever the insane metric for ‘easy’ has been in his life up to this point. So he says them again. He says more. “I don’t know what to do. I scare the shit outta myself sometimes.”

Apparently, that’s all Sam needs to hear, because the older man’s hand is squeezing his shoulder like he has so many times before. “I know, brother. I’ve been there; hell and back. And we’ll get ya through this, ok? But you _gotta_ stop doing this stuff.”

Michael sighs into his arms, feels the ache of old bruises mingling with the sting of the new ones. The anger he’s inherited has grown for years, like a tumor. It takes up all of the space inside, eats away everything that’s good. He remembers the smell of stale beer and all the stupid excuses, the desperate need to understand and the burning bile in his throat when he finally did.

“Yeah, Sam. I know.”

He doesn’t want to be his father. He doesn’t want to play puppet to the beast inside, but he can’t cut it out of himself either, not completely. He can settle it, though, into something basic and clean. Something quiet, and clear, and useful; not a sword, but a scalpel. Because if he thought he had done that before, he had clearly been wrong. He’s never really let himself feel it; he’s always been too afraid that he’d like it too much.

But now his choices are clear: he can forgive the world in all its pettiness and indifference and save his soul, or he can let the anger overtake him; push that ten year old kid back into the metaphorical corner and let him stew in all the unheard words and boiling pain until something has to give.

The truck rumbles to life again, and Mike takes a moment to buckle himself in. There’s some old country song playing on the radio. Warm air blasts from the vents, and he settles back into the seat. He sees the years stretching out ahead of him, all snow covered back roads and lonely brawls in small town bars. He’s been making this decision for years, and he’s running down the clock. He thinks about Nate, and all the words that died on his tongue along with the light in his brother’s eyes.

He’s never known how to be anything but a useful monster. The thrum of the engine lulls him to sleep, safe in the knowledge that he has the time, now, to get it right.


End file.
